


To Banish the Cold

by HaroThar



Category: A Dark Room (Doublespeak Games), Homestuck
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexual Karkat, Blind Character, Deaf Character, Deformed Characters, Humanstuck, Hurt/Comfort, I mean nothing happens but the possibility is presented, Multi, Post-Apocalypse, Survival, Trans Character, Trans Female Character, karkat's pov, mute character, sort of, survival sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-05
Updated: 2015-09-05
Packaged: 2018-04-19 05:15:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4734011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HaroThar/pseuds/HaroThar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Karkat Vantas and you have survived the end of the world. Through a series of events you yourself are not entirely sure of, you manage to set yourself up as a leader of sorts in this frigid wasteland.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Banish the Cold

You are alone, in a fire lit room. It is the one warm place, you know, for a long ways in this post-apocalyptic world. This place is nothing like how people used to think the world would look after its end. Instead of everything dying, it is only the humans that suffered. Mother Nature took her own back, and she took it all back. Trees now stretch higher than their trunks should be able to support, grass can be killed with neither poison nor malice, animals are larger and deformed, and vegetables are no longer shaped by humans, but mutated to survive the deepest cold.

And it is so cold. The sun has forsaken this planet in the same way God has. The summers are no warmer than Russian winters used to be, and if the clouds ever did rain, they would snow. Winter, like what you see now outside your broken door- what you would see if your windows weren’t all blackened and boarded- runs cold enough to freeze blood in its veins, if left exposed to the nature now hellbent on killing what’s left of the human race. Once, before the world ended, this room was the main entry of a house. Now, it holds a fire and yourself, your stores hidden in capsized rooms beyond the walls, hidden in the rubble.

A stranger stumbles into your room. You look at him, and his wild, overgrown hair. He is thin and he is shivering, underdressed for the wicked cold that blows eerily through the limbs of trees around you. You wish the trees made more noise. The forest is so silent.

He looks at your fire with mad eyes, and you wonder how someone mad- even only a little mad- could survive with a single, thin coat in the winter of this hellscape. He inches closer, mumbling unintelligibly, eyes on your fire, and you shuffle wordlessly to the side. He lurches forward, gripping his ratty coat, and kneels near the flames, almost close enough to burn himself.

He mumbles some more, and you stroke his wild red hair silently. He is mad, and you will have to make him leave in the morning, but for now, you allow yourself to pity him.

When his shivering has slowed to barely noticeable, he looks at you. His eyes are still glazed over, but he seems to remember the laws of this new world, and presents himself to you. He lies down on his back and stretches his arms to the side, his right hand skimming along the side of the fire, and spreads his legs to you. You know the laws of this world, too, and figure that there is little a madman could offer you except his body, and crawl on top of him.

Your fingers undo the snaps on his coat and you push aside the old, worn cloth. He is filthy, but so are you, and you kiss him as you run your hands up the sides of his thin body. He is cold against your flesh, and you wonder how blue his lips would look in a natural light. You rub your hands against his body, too fast to be sensual, too slow to be brisk, coaxing warmth and kissing his cold face. His lips, cheeks, nose, eyes, forehead, your lips touch all of him. He is filthy, but so are you, and you kiss the copper rim of his hairline.

You pull his coat from him entirely, the cloth soft with age and wear, and you turn him on his side so that his back can receive some warmth from the dancing light of your flames. He is uncomprehending beneath you, but with your warmth you own him and he does not struggle, only bares his neck to you when it is clear that that is what you want to kiss next. You curl fingers in his hair, the heel of your palm on his forehead, and rub lines into his back. He is filthy, but so are you, and you kiss his jaw as you scratch circles into the base of his neck.

You turn him again, onto his stomach, and let the second side of his body soak in warmth. His hand stretches out, back closer to the fire that you both have rolled away from, and you trace fingers along the lines of his bones. He is filthy, but so are you, and you dig your fingers into his hips and leave a trail of hot kisses down his spine. His shivering has ceased entirely, at this point, and you roll him back over onto his back, near the fire once again. His eyes are still uncomprehending, but no longer incoherent. He is not as mad as you’d thought.

You ask him if he remembers how to talk. After a few false starts, he answers you affirmatively, and you decide that you don’t want to have sex with him. He winces at how loud you are, but you can’t bring yourself to care. This forest is so silent, your footsteps are so silent, your own voice is the only thing that has kept you from the madness as well.

You ask him if he has anything to offer that isn’t his sex, and he answers that his fingers can do things he doesn’t remember learning, and that his arms are stronger than they look. You refasten his coat on him, and tell him to go into the silent forest and bring back as much dead wood as he can carry. He nods at you, madness eking back into his eyes, but you tell yourself he’ll come back to where it’s warm.

He does, and with more wood than you’d expected him to be able to carry. His strength alone will make him useful, and you store the wood he’s brought with your own modest supply. He sits down again by your fire, and you throw a branch onto it; it flares almost instantly. He is shivering again, but he is not as mad as you’d feared he would be. You observe his scraped and scabbing fingers as he warms them in the single dancing blaze, and pull him close to you. You caress his hair and hold his side and he shivers and presses his face into your chest. He is filthy, but so are you, and you kiss his dirty hair and tell him you’ll keep him for the time being. He thanks you with a gratitude you’ve long since grown unaccustomed to, and he sleeps behind you as the night slips through the trees outside. 

Of all the vegetation that has survived the end of the world, zucchini seems to you to be the most tenacious. In this hellscape of corpses and cold, zucchini grows year round, and it grows in even greater quantities than it used to. The stranger cries in gratitude when you give him three, and you are willing to offer him a fourth when he is done. The day is as dark as it always has been, hidden by black clouds that never snow, and the stranger helps you gather wood all through the day. He needs to stop and shiver by your ever-burning fire twice as often as you do, but his clothes and thin frame hardly make that a surprise. 

He tells you, as you both eat zucchini and lean into each other’s body heat in front of the fire, that he used to build things. He’d gather sticks and long dead grass together and make things. “Thatched,” you tell him, and he says that sounds about right. He offers to thatch something for your windows, to keep the eerie wind from slipping in, and maybe put a roof over one of your store “rooms.” You let him, and from the wood that you neither burn nor use for building, you construct a trap that you remember from your childhood, back when the world was first ending. Back when the days still held sunlight and the world wasn’t so cold all the time. Back when plants would still sometimes do what they were told. You set multiple traps out in the woods around you, and make sure that the stranger is lucid when you show him where they all are.

You’ve grown fond of how he keeps your back warm, when you watch the embers dying as you fall asleep at night.

 _“Cara is fearr,”_ he calls you. “Miracle,” he whispers in the silence of the night.

Your traps bring you rabbits. Once, they would have been small enough to carry with one hand. But the end of the world has made them large, furrier than they ever needed to be before and meaty enough that the two of you split one between you and still don’t need to eat the grosser of the organs to feel full. For once, you don’t eat zucchini. The fur you use for the stranger, who is no longer very strange. It is large enough to wrap around his chest, and you tie the skin of its feet together to fasten it on him. He helps you build more traps, and you set them out farther from your fire lit room.

More traps bring in more wildlife. Some rabbits, some birds, some creatures that are neither lizard nor fowl but something that is simultaneously both and new altogether. You try to use the furs you gather evenly between the two of you.

One day, you hear a great noise coming from one of your traps, and when you investigate you find a monstrous, bear-like creature, deeply wounded but not yet dead. Your stranger ties a rock to a hefty branch, and you watch, silent as the forest, as your lover bludgeons the fearsome creature to death. It puts up little resistance before the club.

The two of you sleep under the bear’s fur that night, embers drifting slowly in and out before your eyes, when he whispers into your hair.

“Gamzee,” he tells you, “My name is Gamzee.”

“Karkat,” you say in return, and the two of you say nothing else.

_“Cara is fearr,”_ he calls you. “Miracle,” he says. But you’d never understood the witchy importance of a name until you heard it from his lips. That one sound, two syllables, somehow embodies all of you, everything you are and everything you represent, present in a single word.

It is the brightest, warmest spell cast in the hideously cold forest, and you wonder if “Gamzee” is the same spell to him.

The bear monster becomes a coat for Gamzee, and the two of you eat easily for two weeks on the meat it gave you. You fix the traps that could be fixed, and build new traps for the two that the bear had wrecked entirely. Rabbits still get caught in steady numbers, and Gamzee helps you smoke them and preserve the meat for later. He no longer needs to take breaks twice as often as you, and you both are heavy-laden with the furs that you collect together. The winter around you is still bitter, hateful, and cruel, but it is not as cold as it was before you met him.

He kisses your throat, one night, as you lay together in front of the fire, and you are filthy but so is he, so he kisses you again, and suggests that he builds a hut in the clearing the two of you have made. Other people would work for the two of you, if they had someplace out of the wind to stay. You don’t have it in you to deny him anything, in that moment, and agree with him that it’s a good idea. So while you check the traps and gather wood the next day, he starts thatching walls. When you skin the animals you’ve caught and separate the meat from the bones from the organs from the scales from the claws from the teeth from the fur, he makes a door that is sturdy enough to stay but light enough to open. When you haul water up from a well that stretches down into eternity, close enough to the planet’s core that it is liquid instead of endless ice, he assembles a roof. 

You are in awe of your lover, frankly, that he could put up a hut in a day. But you have the resources, and his fingers are scabbed and scratched and dexterous and strong. You kiss his weary fingers that night, when you’ve both eaten and are hiding from the silence underneath the skins of a dozen rabbits. He calls you _“cara is fearr,”_ and you tell him he’s a miracle, and the two of you wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of someone stumbling into the empty hut Gamzee built. You see, when you crack open your door, the start of a fire flickering inside, and three moving shadows. One closes the door firmly, and the only indication that there is anyone there is the smoke curling out of the exhaust in the center of the roof, right where Gamzee made it.

Your half-mad lover chuckles at how quickly the two of you got visitors and you pull him tighter underneath your blanket of furs and tell him to sleep, that he’ll meet them in the morning. You are filthy, but so is he, and he kisses your chapped lips before the two of you return to your slumber.

There are three of them, and you knew that before. All are deformed by this wicked world, but none are overly hindered. The man among them pisses you off with his rude mannerisms, but you’re also fond of his humor. One of his eyes is missing the sclera; his blue iris has entirely taken over everything that isn’t the pupil. His other eye is red, and the iris is only starting to bleed out into the sclera. The taller girl has a faint bioluminescence, and tells you her name is Kanaya. You do not tell her yours- yet. The third member is a girl who clearly suffered from The Rot a great deal in the past. Her skin is deformed and warped in many places, and she tells you that Kanaya is a healer and a gardener, who kept her from dying of The Rot.

You have Kanaya help you with your zucchini plants, and she knows things that you do not. You’re grateful for that, since it looks like you’ll need a greater yield in the future. She then searches the silent forest for herbs that she knows, and can turn into medicine, and you leave her to her own devices. The eye-boy and death-girl you have help you and your non-sexual lover with the wood and traps. Your fires are kept blazing, and Gamzee has more wood and more time to work with. He builds a cart, which takes a lot of wood but the payback is fivefold in the first day.

There is room in their hut for one more resident, but only just. So when two wanderers arrive early one bitterly cold morning, Kanaya vacates the hut long enough for them to warm their bones. Gamzee urges you to let them stay, and you remind him that your room has enough space for the two of you, and the hut has enough room for one of the new strangers. He tells you that that’s an easy enough fix, he’ll just build another hut.

The strangers are in the middle of explaining that they’ve survived this long together, and if need be they’ll die together. They will not be separated. Gamzee, your precious Gamzee, interrupts them, and tells them that he’ll build them a hut if they’ll help.

They are not stupid, so of course they do.

The girl is incredibly strong, and has a fully-functional set of gills. The boy, on the other hand, does not appear to be mutated in the slightest, until you talk to him, and you realize there’s something fucked up with his tongue. They’re both desperate, and you silently promise to yourself that you will help them.

“Kind,” your lover calls you, as the newcomers rest in front of their fire, outside of the cold. He reminds you that he knows that you only pretend to hate everyone to cover up how much you care and how much you desperately wish you didn’t. He tells you that you’re warm and burning and fierce, but kind, kind, kind enough to fill the whole world with it. “Firevoice,” he calls you, and you think the title fits.

Two months later, you are checking traps with Sollux, whose name you now know just as he knows yours. You are arguing with him, as you always seem to be, and enjoying yourself, even as your angry breath fogs in the air in front of you. Aradia- and you now know her name just as she knows yours- Kanaya, Feferi, and Eridan are in pairs as well. Gamzee is maintaining the fires, and warming himself in the process, and you find that you are genuinely happy with your life in this hellscape of corpses and cold.

Another duo arrives to your tiny gathering. They are cold, but they are not desperate. They are frightening and violent, and the small girl is ready to knock Gamzee out cold if it meant the two of them could warm themselves on the fires. They have survived the winter, they will survive the spring.

Gamzee, your Gamzee, your half-mad fool, does not notice that, and welcomes them into your village with open arms and a happy smile. When you return to your clearing, the two are no longer as frightening and violent as they were, and they are both willing to work in exchange for the open spaces in Feferi and Eridan’s hut. This girl is small, stunted, though not as stunted as you. Her companion is large, grotesquely so, muscular in a way that is in no way natural but not self-imposed either.

You tell them the way of things, your way of life, here in this village of The Firevoiced. The man seems glad of it, relieved, even, but the girl has a fierce smile when she tells you that if you gave her the resources, she could hunt for you. You tell her that you already have traps, and she shakes her head.

“Hunt,” she tells you, and there is a murderous glint in her eye. Hunting big game. Hunting creatures like the bear your half-mad lover’s coat is made of. If she had a blade, or even a sharp enough spear, she could get you fur and meat in quantities you’d never seen, claws and teeth and bones for your scar-girl’s witchcraft.

She becomes the huntress of your tiny village, and her companion goes with her. For all his size, he is silent as a ghost when he moves. He does not kill, but merely carries everything she catches with his unnatural musculature. Combined with your traps and your garden, you have enough meat and zucchini to keep you all not only fed, but gaining weight. Combined with your traps, you have enough fur to keep you all walking in bundles and sleeping under blankets too.

Gamzee tells you, one night, as you caress his face and leave kisses on his eyelids, that he figures he should build another hut soon. You have enough meat, zucchini, and fur for four more people, maybe five, if Aradia’s hut ever gains a fourth person.

You pull his fingers up to your lips, and kiss his scars and scabs and scrapes. You ask him how large he wants your village to get, and his eyes go dreamy when he answers that he doesn’t know. He’s filthy, but so are you, and you kiss his chapped lips and he winds his whipcord arms around your back. You don’t have it in you to tell him no. You don’t think you ever will.

The next day, however, he does not build a new hut. He goes to gather his share of deadwood, a task that does not grow overly difficult since the giant, dark trees around you grow too fast and shed their dead limbs rather quickly. On his way, however, he encounters a crippled beggar, crawling on his arms and freezing to death.

You know you should tell Gamzee that the cripple can’t stay here. This world is no longer one that allows for frivolities like charity. But the cripple presented to Gamzee, out there in the woods, and you see in your lover’s eyes a carnal hunger that you both know you cannot satisfy. So you look at the beggar draped over your Gamzee’s shoulders, and you sigh. His hair is falling out in large patches, a single streak of hair down the middle being the only portion intact. Perhaps he suffers from paralysis, you do not know and you do not care. His face is not one you would find attractive, but you are not who he presented to.

You help Gamzee shear off the hair on the sides of the cripple’s head; leaving the middle streak as though it was intentional, perhaps styled. As the hair comes off and the bald spots are no longer spots, you see Gamzee’s hunger grow in his eyes, and you know that you will have him in your small town for the night.

You go with Nepeta, whose name you know now just as she knows yours, in Equius’ stead for that day, leaving Gamzee and the cripple in your small, fire lit room. You kill nothing, but luckily Nepeta kills plenty, and you haul the carcasses for her much like Equius would have. You are not as quiet as he is, but Nepeta seems to understand that you have something on your mind.

You do not want to have something on your mind. You do not want your treacherous thoughts to continue slipping back into “what ifs.” You do not want to ponder possible solutions, possibilities that would allow the cripple to stay with you all. You cannot help someone who can add nothing to your community. You simply cannot. Not if you all want to continue surviving. Not long term. Yes, you are living nicely nowadays, and you could probably support him well enough, but you’ve been trained by Mother Nature herself that if there is a weak link, it will be eliminated, one way or another. You cannot survive with a member of your town doing nothing. But what could a cripple add to your society? What job could you possibly give him?

You do not know, and you are trying so hard not to care. You are trying so hard to focus on being quiet, on shouldering the heavy weight of dead animals, on possibly hunting. You’re trying so hard, and your success is entirely nonexistent.

That night, the cripple sleeps in Sollux’s hut, and the name “Tavros” never seems to leave your lover’s lips. You had thought Gamzee’s fancy was only lust, and you now see that you were wrong. It is for that- for him- that you finally, well and truly, succumb to your mind’s desire to plan and plot and scheme. You’re not sure what role you will find for a man who cannot walk, but you promise Gamzee that you’ll find something.

He cries again in gratitude and calls you “miracle.” He says that if anyone could make it possible, it’s you, and he kisses your lips and breathes _“cara is fearr,”_ into your hair. He tells you that he would follow your firevoice to the end of this planet, and you kiss his collarbone. 

The next day, Gamzee helps you weave ten latticework traps and hide them in the woods with pieces of zucchini inside as bait. They are traps meant to capture, not to kill, and when that chore is done Gamzee warms himself by the fire in Kanaya’s hut. You know, however, that he is in there for someone who is decidedly not Kanaya, and warn Sollux before he unwittingly walks in on something.

Five days later, you enter Tavros’ hut with eight latticework traps and Equius. Inside the traps are five female and three male rabbits. 

“Breed them” you order the cripple, and leave him to figure that part out on his own. You don’t have time to babysit creatures as wily as rabbits, but breeding them would be a boost to your resources, you know. You cannot sit around all day, but Tavros can, and will.

There is meat. There is fur. Tavros is useful, and Gamzee is happy.

That is enough.

Gamzee does build a new hut, then. Tavros stays in Aradia’s hut, and if you’re not wrong, you’d say the two of them have a potential to grow close. It’s no business of yours, but you find yourself caring anyway.

Your first visitor is not someone who wants to stay, however. Her left arm and eye are deeply plagued by The Rot and underneath her coat, you think you see mold growing on The Rot on her arm. She comes to you with swagger, never begging or desperate, but acting as though she’s doing you a favor. She tells you she’s been all over, and can teach you how to scout like she does. She’ll give you a map and tell you everything she’s learned about travelling in this rural portion of hell, but in return, someone needs to help her with The Rot.

It’s a fair trade, and you’re outrageously curious about what it would be like to leave this town and explore. You take her to your healer’s hut, and Kanaya carves The Rot from her eye as she teaches you what it means to scout. Her arm must be amputated, there is simply nothing else to do for it, but here, at least, the wound will be properly tended and catch no infection. She hands you a map of the area, and then ignores you in favor of flirting with Kanaya.

That is fine. You take the map back to your room and pin it delicately to the wall. It’s large, and not fully filled in, perhaps the scout knows you will want to travel further than what is marked and will fill it in yourself. Or perhaps it was a cheap deal. You don’t mind. When Gamzee lies down with you that night, he tells you that he saw Kanaya and the stranger go together into the new hut. You’re glad for Kanaya, and pray the scout does not leave anything unsavory behind her. You don’t need any diseases in your village.

The scout leaves in the morning, winking pointedly at Kanaya, who blushes. What a silly thing to be embarrassed about, here at the end of the world. Gamzee sets to work on building more intricate things, he has ideas for a trading post, a building to tan the furs into leather, a building dedicated solely to smoking and storing the meat you get, maybe a workshop to build tools. You are hopeful for his success. Your half-mad lover can make a myriad of things that you thought him incapable of, and to be honest, buildings like those would be quite useful.

You set to packing. There’s an old iron mine within walking distance, perhaps an hour’s walk. Hopefully an hour’s walk. Maybe two. The world is too cold to be away from a source of heat for too long, too cold to stay in the wind. You’ve done it, of course, you’ve survived and found your room, just like Gamzee, just like all the members of your town, but you have no desire to stumble into an abandoned mine half-dead and freezing. 

You hesitate. You hesitate for three days before going on your first excursion. In that time, Gamzee constructs a tannery. It’s crude, and he wishes for finer tools, but Tavros is placed in charge of crafting leather from the furs you and your camp do not use. In that time, four strangers stumble into your village, hearing from the scout that there is a place out of the wind for them, should they work for it. You do not tell them your name, and honestly you do not want to. They are cold, they are desperate, they work for you, but they do not feel like “yours.” Not in the same way the others do.

You ask Gamzee if that’s a sign that you’re going mad. He tells you that it’s not. 

The next day, you leave to reclaim the abandoned iron mine, and you bring wood and food with you. There is a large and scaly beast living in the mine, and you fight it single handedly with the bone spear you brought with you. It takes you five hours sitting by a small fire that you’ve made to feel better after the fight. But the scales and meat it gives you are plentiful, and now the mine is safe for workers.

The four whose names you do not know are set to work on restarting the mine. Machines do almost everything, but machines must be maintained. Gamzee builds sturdy bags and waterskins from the leather Tavros crafts. The strangers rename your lover “the builder” just as Kanaya is “the healer” and you think that it fits. You, they ask. They ask you what they should call you, and you tell them to call you “the firevoice.” The all agree, it fits. Their agreement warms you, and you wonder if you will learn their names, someday.

You ask Gamzee, once again, if that’s a sign that you’re going mad. He laughs and strokes your hair and whispers _“cara is fearr,”_ into your hair. No, he tells you, you’re not going mad, and you are content with his words and his hand rubbing warm circles into your belly.

He builds for you. A hut went up in the day you were gone, and a workshop goes up in the days you are here. Tavros’ leather and your new strangers’- and you realize that they are yours- your strangers’ iron go together with the wood you all gather, and Gamzee builds things for you. A cask for your water, a wagon for your travelling, a sword of iron that you can fight with that Nepeta dislikes, light armor to protect you from fangs and claws and thickly muscled appendages. Nepeta takes your old bone spear, and hunts with a weapon in both hands.

You thoroughly explore everything within a day’s walk from your fire lit room. Gamzee worries the first day you do not make it back before nightfall and you apologize to him, but warn him it will be happening with greater frequency, soon. You bring stones with you in the wagon that he made, and set fires for yourself on them. You remember what happens when someone tries to light a fire without a specified pit, here in this forest of overgrown trees and dead branches on the floor. You remember suffocating smoke and a terrible blaze all around you. Your back and arms and face and thighs have mottled skin, burned flesh of years past, and you are smart enough not to set yourself and everyone you love on fire.

After a month of exploring and hesitating, you have found every cave within walking distance, and have marked them and set up firepits with wood and flint inside them. There is a city- one likely to still have people in it- on the very edge of the map the scout sold you, and you determine to finally go there. Gamzee fears for your life, but you do not. You have a knife, sword, and armor beneath your furs; you do not fear the people of a fallen city. Your whole village wishes you well when you leave, and you joke that you’d think you were marching to your own funeral, not travelling to a different city.

The night is bitter without Gamzee, but you hole up in a cave that you have claimed for yourself and keep warm. You try not to wonder if the night is just as bitter back in your fire lit room, for him. 

When you arrive, noon has long since come and passed, but it is not yet night. The people in this dead city are no different from the strangers who live with you, now numbering twelve, since Gamzee seems to stress-build huts whenever you’re away. But no, that’s not quite right. They are fearful in a way your people are not. They do not speak to you; they do not meet your eyes. They are hollow husks, ghosts of people, and you almost wish Aradia were here so you could joke with her that these people seem more her forte. You marvel that people so hollow could survive without a passionate desperation to continue living, but learn soon enough why they are so broken. 

Men and women with guns and sharp knives lounge easily on the backbones of the broken people beneath them. A terrible sense of tyranny washes over you in waves when you look at them, and they do no work. The ones with weapons feed off the lives of those without, and it strikes a terrible sense of justice within you.

For all their blustering, however, you only have two bullet wounds in your left leg by the time you’ve killed them all. You’ve fought mindless beasts armed with only tooth and tail that have left you more injured than these boisterous fools. The guns and bullets, you take, and promise at least one of them will go to Nepeta. You mutter that she’ll probably shit herself in excitement, and then wonder if you look mad to the shells of people inching toward you in the background.

They ask you if you plan on ruling over them, now that you have the weapons, and have shown that you are clearly capable of killing. You have a village of your own. However, you think there is a way for this to be mutually beneficial to you all. You deal with the people of the city, all gathered now to see what the gunshots were about. The people of your home, of the village of The Firevoiced, will have a sanctuary here. Food, water, and warmth must all be offered to you or your people when you pass through here, and the same would be done for them in your village. The Second City of the Firevoiced, they call themselves now. A child, ugly with rot, asks you what a Firevoice is. You tell her it’s your title.

“That fits,” agree the people of this city, and you load Gamzee’s wagon with ancient supplies scavenged from the buildings. Buildings with trees growing through their very centers, branches hanging out of broken windows and a canopy forming over the buildings’ roofs. Buildings falling to rubble with earthquakes and fires and decay. Buildings littered with rotting corpses that fainter hearts dare not explore. You go through all of them, and bring the spoils home with you.

There are containers of DryBath in one of the stores filled with corpses. You take all of them. There are packets of seeds hanging on a wire rack that you take, wondering if they’ll survive in this new world and thinking of Kanaya. There are cans of food that you forgot once existed.

It’s been so long since you’ve tasted a tomato. The red looks brilliant on Gamzee’s lips.

You make him use a DryBath, and then spread a packet of the gel over yourself. He is no longer filthy, and neither are you, and you kiss his jaw and cheek, his neck and collar and sternum. He “presents” to you, much like he had back on that first night, and you touch his skin and kiss his fingers and he strokes your back and whispers about miracles and a tongue of flames. You are close, intimate, and you drown yourself in the smell of him, now unhindered by dirt and sweat and grime. You touch him in every way except sexually, and he breathes praise into your ear and hair and the side of your face.

Tavros’ rabbits are either gravid or nursing, and you comment offhandedly while you visit him with Kanaya the next day. She coughs, and mentions to you that she is also pregnant.

You learn, surprised, that the scout she slept with was a trans-woman, and the biological mother of Kanaya’s child. You do care. You care a great deal, and do not pretend you don’t.

The thought of an infant human terrifies you, and Gamzee strokes fearful tears from your eyes that night. Anything resembling a hopeful future, you find, frightens you, and you ask Gamzee if that means you’re going mad.

“Maybe,” he says, but even that calms you, because at least if Gamzee is here with you, the madness won’t be so bad. You rely on him in a way a past version of yourself would kill you for, for being this vulnerable. You tell the past version of yourself to go fuck himself, and pull the blankets tighter around the two of you.

More huts go up, and you learn more names. Terezi, Damara, Latula, Mituna. Mituna is mad, but endearing, and Latula with her Rotted nose watches after him. Damara’s tongue is even more inefficient than Eridan’s, but she is strong and she is fierce and you are in admiration of her violence. 

Terezi is blind, but you learned that after you learned her name. Her nose and ears and sister compensate for her eyes, Rotted out behind her rose-colored glasses. She sees the world through anything but, though, and her sense of justice is even more terrible than yours. She is all canines and nails and hellfire when it comes to wrongs, and she is cables of strength when it comes to making things right. You trust her, you realize, and perhaps, in a different life, in a different world, you may have loved her.

You do not.

Meenah, Kurloz, Horuss, Meulin. Meenah is all bloody knuckles and acidic reflexes, sharp and smart and she knows how to make dirt into riches. Kurloz is mute, and you don’t know why, but his hands are nimble and he works with Aradia, his witchcraft in bones and dreams, hers in teeth and ghosts. Horuss gets along famously with Equius, and both are silent when they do not speak. Meulin gets along famously with Nepeta, although she could not hunt if a wounded animal stumbled right into her. In that, she frustrates Nepeta, but in their love of their larger, muscularly deformed men, they always share a ground of understanding.

You visit more cities, each one farther away from your fire lit room than the last. Gamzee misses you deeply during these trips, but the idea of leaving the village terrifies him. You try to reason with him. Having four cities, Firevoiced the second through the fifth, trading resources with you and offering refuge to you all, is nothing but beneficial. Kanaya’s garden promises vegetation that is neither bark-covered or zucchini, and you are hopeful that her labors pay off. You remind him that he’d live on zucchini until the day he died if you hadn’t gone a town over. You remind him that you have medicine raided from collapsed buildings filled with corpses, and that Tavros’ illness was too violent for Kanaya’s home-made concoctions to battle alone. He quiets at that, stuck between two lovers, and you feel bad.

You kiss his lips and caress his cheeks and tell him that you’re safe, the roads are dusty and small but you are not attacked on them, and the cities and villages you pull into your vague supervision are beneficial and you are not attacked after the initial battle for dominance. He whispers that you should not battle, you should just stay home, with him, and you cannot tell him no.

Three months pass. Kanaya starts to show signs of pregnancy, and at five months she is the largest member of your village. Gamzee’s huts grow sturdier, though not larger. Larger would make heating difficult, so you just enlarge the clearing more and pack the huts in tightly. Kanaya, Sollux, Aradia, and Tavros move into one of the newer huts, and you leave the door of their old hut open to air out the smell of them. DryBath is produced in one of the cities you have liberated from guns and started trade with, and for iron from your mine you get plenty. Even so, their old hut does not smell nice.

Their old home is transformed into the witches' hut. Aradia and Kurloz take their materials and set up a witchy workshop of their own. The smell does not grow any more pleasant, but it changes to something earthier and vaguely frightening. You do not try to stop them when they take over the hut. You know better than to argue with a witch.

Days later, your village gains four more people. You are surprised at the sight of them, because at a glance, none of them seem marked by the end of the world. But you speak with them, and they gravitate toward you, for whatever reason, and you learn about them. One has red eyes, and must wear sunglasses even in the endless darkness of the snowless clouds, or else his vision pains him. One’s eyes have turned violet, and you do not know what that means for her vision, but her witchcraft is in scales and foresight, and Aradia and Kurloz welcome her into their fold with eagerness. One is narcoleptic, and you do not fear for her life because she has a hellhound for a pet. It is so fast, and you are frightened by it.

But the fourth one is, well and truly, unmarked by the end of the world. He would squint less if he had glasses to wear, but aside from that, he is unmarred. He smiles as easily as your half-mad lover and would pull pranks if you did not almost murder him for the first time. He has not been touched by Rot, not been burned by flames, not frozen halfway to death. He is not desperate, and he is not violent. 

You hate him for it.

You hate that you and all who you call yours have been desperate, violent, freezing, starving, parched, bleeding, Rotted, burning, and that he has not been. But that is a petty thing to hate him for, and you know it, and you tell Gamzee and he tells you it is a petty thing for you to hate him for.

So you are certain to hate him for other things.

You hate him for dumb things, like his teeth and his casual friendship with everyone, it seems like. You hate him for moderate things, like wasting a perfectly edible zucchini pranking his red-eyed friend. You hate him for serious things, like his propensity for surprising people who should not be surprised and his aimless wandering that takes him too far from camp.

In your anger, you tell Gamzee that you’re going to look for another city, to the northeast, where all compasses are brokenly pointing. He begs you not to go, but you have it in you to tell him no, this time. You ask Nepeta and Terezi if they want to join you, and they do. You ask Sollux, and he doesn’t, but Eridan volunteers himself, and you lend him a gun too heavy for you to use easily. It fits in his hands like it was made with him in mind. You consider telling him to just keep the damn thing.

Meenah and Damara hear you’re bringing people with you, and while sometimes you wonder how well they get along, you take them with you willingly. Damara has a violence you’d like to see let out on people you want dead, and Meenah’s scavenging skills will be wholly desirable when you pick through remains, looking for loot.

Terezi gets hit with tear gas in the fight for the sixth city of the Firevoiced, and you’d laugh if it weren’t for the fact that there were people trying to kill you. Of all the people, Terezi was the worst target conceivable. Meenah shoves a car off a tree branch, where it had been grown straight through like the living wood was a pike, and it crushes three people. Damara, you lose somewhere during the fight, and she returns to you with blood running from her hands in rivers and none of it is hers. You resolve never to worry about Damara in a fight ever again. Nepeta stays by your side, and Eridan snipes from afar.

You all emerge from the fight uninjured, and you think you should bring them along with you each trip to new cities from then on. Terezi is the only one who thinks she might not go along with every trip. You speak with the people there, as you did with the other cities that took your name, and the people are even more eager to accept your dealings than the ones before them. They tell you of an old coal mine, and Eridan whispers in his broken tongue that iron and coal makes steel, and coal burns hotter than wood.

You make them all into your workers. The more coal they produce for you, the more meat, fur, and zucchini you will provide for them. They are all but too eager to please. But first, you have to clear out the mine for them, since they cannot do it themselves.

Nepeta and Damara fight the bear-creature of the coal mine while Terezi and Meenah hold torches. You and Eridan are ready to step in and help at any moment, but they’re Nepeta and Damara. They need no assistance.

You haul the thing into the half-broken caravan cart that you’d found upturned on the streets of the Sixth Firevoiced. Eridan notices you staring at it, and you shake your head. You know Eridan well, and you’ve known him for a long time. You’d share, but not with Meenah, or Damara. Not Terezi, either, for all that you care about her. Something about how you care for her sits wrong in your mouth, and you don’t want to share any moments of intimacy with her.

That night, you tell Eridan of how Gamzee had come to you half-dead with cold, and how his dual-layered coat is made of a bear-monster similar to the one Damara and Nepeta had killed. Gamzee had bludgeoned the thing- Eridan’s eyes widen at that- but it was half dead from the start anyway- he tells you that makes more sense. Even quieter, you tell Eridan about how the two of you had slept under the heavy fur together- how it was the first blanket you’d shared with him- and Eridan laughs his broken-tongue laugh and tweaks the top of your ear affectionately. You realize, with something of a start, that in a different life, in a different world, you may have loved him.

You do not.

You return home with Meenah’s successful bounty and the bear-monster and a new wagon in need of fixing, and find that in the time you left, Kanaya has found herself a new lover in the form of a violet-eyed newcomer. Terezi tells you that she saw that pairing coming, and you smack her side playfully at the bad joke.

Gamzee gathers you in his arms and does not let you go for love of food or water. He takes you back to your fire lit room and cages you with his limbs and the blanket and kisses you on every inch of skin he can find. You are filthy, but so is he, and he pins you with his weight and warmth and love.

He cannot bear to be apart from you that long again. You tell him that you cannot stay forever, that there’s so much you can do in this world that will better your village and better the lives in other cities. You tell him you want to go, that you want to explore, that you want to bind the straggling members of this forsaken human race together, and he cries. He weeps into your shoulder and begs you not to leave again.

“Come with me,” you tell him. You can’t tell if it’s an order, a suggestion, or a plea, but he kisses your lips and you hold his wet face and he agrees. He shakes, and he clings to you like you’re the last warm thing in this world, and you hold him and pet him and shush him and kiss his tear-stained lips and tell him that you love him.

Months later, you are prepared for another excursion, but holding back. No one wants to leave when Kanaya is this gravid. You, however, are terrified and would like to be gone for the event itself. 

She does have her child, and your village of nearly fifty people- almost all of whom you know by name- are present and excited for the birth. The three witches, Rose especially, and Feferi are the only ones allowed inside Kanaya’s hut, but everyone else waits on eagerly outside.

Kanaya can walk after the birth, which you are in awe of, and the child is so laden in furs you don’t even fear for its fragile temperature. 

“Matria,” Kanaya announces, “Her name is Matria.”

You all agree, it fits.

She has you hold Matria, and you are sitting and your arms shake with how tightly you’ve coiled your muscles. You do not admit, even to yourself, that they are shaking because you are afraid. You are afraid of this tiny child. Afraid of this world, and what and who this infant will become. Kanaya has brought a life into this world. And it terrifies you.

The night of Matria’s birth, and the night before your group leaves for the next city, you pin Gamzee beneath you with your arms making an arch over top him. He smiles at you and strokes your face, pets your hair where it lines your forehead and cheekbones and traces a thumb slowly over your lips. He caresses your face and neck until you’re comfortable enough to be afraid, and you descend on him and cling to him and shake. He does not understand your fear, but he tells you that he does not need to. Your fears are your own and he will hold you until you can walk through them once again.

You pass through the Third City of the Firevoiced, southwest of your home, searching for the next city. The people there recognize you, and are in awe of your companions. Gamzee especially, they take a certain interest in. You wonder if your relationship is truly that obvious. Or maybe it’s because he’s half-mad and kinder than anyone you know. Terezi asks if anyone of those gathered know where the nearest city is that is not in the direction you came from, and they point you directly south.

You go, and after three days you find that a small suburb lays ahead, empty houses scorched and peeling. Broken streetlights stand, rusting, in dark streets. Light is just as foreign here as it is back home. There is a schoolhouse; black with soot, with shattered windows, and the creaking of its doors is the loudest sound you’ve ever heard. Gamzee grips your hand tightly as you survey the empty suburb, and wonder if you were led astray by your followers. No one is here. Resources are, though, and Meenah is delighted to pack your wagons with valuables- and items you don’t think are all that valuable, but she’s the scavenger, not you. You’re the zucchini farmer that has ‘miraculously’ survived a large number of fights and somehow gathered a relatively large following.

There is a Costco on the far end of the suburb, and Meenah has perched on Terezi’s shoulders in excitement. Cars that clearly crashed- the corpses of their passengers still rotting inside them- block the entrances, but a tree has grown through one of the walls on the side and with Gamzee’s height and strength, you all reach the opening easily enough.

It is inside that you see what happened to the inhabitants of this suburb. Five of them are left, and they attack your group halfway through entering the building. You think that Gamzee will stay on the tree branch, out of range of the gunshots, and your group is just getting into the first portion of what looks like it will be a substantial fight- you fear for casualties- when Gamzee proves you wrong.

He has a club made from the half-dead wood pried from one of the tree’s lower branches, and he slaughters all five of them with it. Nepeta, Damara, and you are the ones in the greatest awe. Eridan taps your shoulder and asks you if you knew Gamzee could do that, and you shake your head mutely.

You approach him and touch his arm, and he flinches. His eyes are wide and he’s staring in horror at the corpses, then you, then his own two hands. He tells you, quietly, that he didn’t mean to. He grows in volume as he continues, apologizing, explaining that he saw them trying to hurt you and he just motherfucking lost it, he didn’t mean to kill them, he’s sorry, and you hush him. You pet his face and slide your fingers up under his hat into his flaming hair. You quiet him while your group picks over the old store. There is little of value, but you take the ammunitions the people here had gathered together and Meenah and Gamzee discuss building materials from what isn’t rusted over.

You continue on your journey. The suburb was a bust and so you are not yet at a point where you need to turn around. You head further south and find another city, just a little to the east of directly south from the abandoned suburb.

Rusted chainlink is pulled across an alleyway, and fires burn in the cold courtyard winds. Faces, darkened by soot and blood, stare out from crooked huts. A frail man stands defiantly in the doorway of one of them, and you try to talk to him, since he seems to be the only one unafraid of you. 

You don’t know why he fights you. He was carrying a canvas sack, containing a steel sword, a bit of meat, and a few scraps of cloth. The sack and sword will be useful. The meat, you don’t feel too certain about. In the large, abandoned factory, you find a swarm of rats, all of which are twice the size of rats of old, all of which attack you. Nepeta is ecstatic. You are not. By the end, all of the fur on your legs has been shredded, and the leather portion of your armor has been gnawed through. You fasten makeshift patches out of the furs of the dead rats until you get home to actually fix the problems they’ve made.

It takes you two days to establish communication with the people there. Turns out, they’re all suffering from The Rot or madness, or both. Those that can comprehend the terms of your deal turn cunning very quickly. They apologize for ignoring your group with a viper-like hunger in their eyes. You know exactly why, they want you to help with The Rot.

You are interested in helping with The Rot, but also know that they can give you something substantial in return. They can. There is an abandoned steelworks just to the east of the city, and if you have coal and iron- which you do- they will gladly work for you, provided you send them medicine for The Rot.

The deal could not be better suited to everyone’s needs. On your return journey from the Seventh Firevoiced, you encounter the scout that started you on these crazy expeditions. She looks better without her arm than she did with it, you think idly. She is all bragging swagger, offering to sell you maps of the distant places she has been, in exchange for lodging and a certain amount of payment, of course, and you are happy to oblige. You also rather wonder what her reaction will be when she sees her biological daughter, and pointedly do not tell her.

Kanaya greets the scout politely, with a large level of non-romantic happiness. You observe their meeting from a relatively safe distance- one that is out of earshot. At first, the scout seems upset, even hostile when Kanaya shows her Matria. Then Kanaya says something, and Rose walks over: the actual mother of the scout’s biological child. The scout relaxes visibly, even from your distance. She then seems friendly and endearing, cooing over the child like your entire village has cooed over her, and Rose hooks her arm around Kanaya’s waist.

You suppose that if you were a scout, you would not want the responsibility of a child either. You know that Kanaya would never want her child to have a mother that didn’t want her, though, and so you know for a fact that she told the scout not to worry about it. At that, you leave the four ladies to their business, and go to your room, where Gamzee is already tending to the fire.

You clean each other’s bodies and mend each other’s armor and clothing in the firelight, recounting your journey. In the morning, you learn that the scout had spent the night with Terezi while she sells you her maps and tells you what she has learned about those areas. You pay her in fur and food and the promise that she has passage in all the cities that bare your name, and she grins a wicked grin when she leaves you. She grins a wicked grin when she says goodbye to Terezi. She grins a wicked grin at Kanaya and her lover, loudly wishing them well in an embarrassing manner. She smiles sweetly at her biological child, without the love it takes to stick around but with just enough to care.

Your excursions get longer, sometimes taking you away from your village for a whole month. Gamzee is with you on all of them, while Terezi stays behind more frequently. The people in your extension cities come up with a nickname for you and your lover.

“Messiahs” they call you. You are the Firevoiced, and your half-mad fool is the Mirthful. You try and convince Gamzee to go quell the rumors one trip, while you are discussing matters with the elected leaders of that town, and instead of such nonsense going down he comes back to you with a new title for you spun into circulation.

“The Maker of Miracles,” they call you, thanks to him. You cuff him backside the head and he laughs as careless as the leaves, telling you it’s true. Firevoiced, Miraculous, those titles he shares gladly with everyone who sees you.

 _”Cara is fearr,”_ he keeps all to himself. He whispers it into your ears when you and you alone are the one to hear it.

Even so, you do not put Gamzee in charge of slaying rumors ever again. You are not miraculous. You are just a man who cares a lot and yells a lot and wants to survive so much you’ll break your knuckles open fighting for it.

Aradia, Kurloz, and Rose have made your entourage charms. Charms that will protect you, from cold, from insects, from The Rot, from hunger. You do not know if they work, but you take them anyway. The three witches make items for Kanaya, who in turn heals people with tools she is not certain of the origins of. You keep their charms with you always, and hang them around the doorframe of your fire lit room when you are not outside. Gamzee believes in the charms with his soul, and you believe in them only partially.

The steel allows Gamzee to build things you didn’t know he could build, and with new armor, new supplies, your entourage can travel even farther. More people join you, people like Dirk, Jake, Equius, Jade, Roxy, and a strange girl whose name you do not know. She is new, and does not like you, but has a violence within her that draws her to Damara and you are content to leave them to their devices.

She is your first casualty.

You are far to the northeast, once again searching for whatever your broken compass is pointing towards, when you come across a truly magnificent ruin. A battered highway sign greets you at the entrance of this once-great city. The skyscrapers that one towered, imposing, have almost all crumbled, and their metal remains jut into the dark skyline like the ribcages of ancient beasts. The air is filled with dust, driven relentlessly by the hard, cold wind.

The farther into the city you get, the colder the wind becomes. Jade tells you it is because the ancient buildings are acting as wind tunnels, the perfect grid of the streets making tight and linear passages for the air to flow through with its bitter, blind, natural hatred.

There is a portion where the subway has been entirely capsized open, the streets and buildings on top of it blown into ash and sand and dust. You do not know if you want to investigate the sounds echoing from the tunnels that are covered, but Nepeta does, and you know better than to try and give her orders you know she will not follow. Also, you are cold, and Gamzee is as well. At least when you reach the underground portion, the wind is not so terrible.

The noises in that forsaken place are wet, thick, like flesh hitting concrete repeatedly. You do not like it. Gamzee does not like it. Jake and Dirk and Eridan do not like it. Nepeta, Damara, and the one whose name you do not know, on the other hand, could not be more enthralled with the thrill of the hunt. 

The great tentacle of a new world kraken catches the sleek girl by surprise, and her leg breaks. You all attack it viciously, and you are the first to realize it is trying to sneak two tentacles around behind you all, and drag you into its hellish mouth. Jade, Roxy, Jake, and you fire at the tentacles that would mean your demise. Eridan is desperately trying to snipe the hellbeast in the eye, aiming for the brain that has to be somewhere in that writing mass of flesh, but it is seemingly impossible.

The girl whose name you do not know fights with a fire you’ve never seen. Not in Gamzee, when he thought you were going to die, not in Damara, at the peak of her blood fray, not in anyone. She is a terror, she is sulfur and brimstone, she is the icy speed of the winds that howl above you and the fire that you can still feel in the burns on your back. She kills it, with bullet and sword and, finally, spear. She kills it just as it kills her. Her dying scream is a laugh and a song of anguish and it is louder than even silence.

You return her to her group of friends so that they may mourn her, and publicly give her the title “hellsinger.” 

Anyone who knew her agrees, it fits.

You all eat squid-octopus-creature for weeks, a whole town of people fed by one monstrosity. Hellsinger’s friends tell you that this is exactly how she wanted to die, and you take a bit of solace in that.

Gamzee holds your hand and pets your hair for nights after her loss, and you hum to him and stroke his cheek for days. It is the day that reminds him of her, and the night that reminds you. Although you did not know her, her death weighs heavily on your conscious, and the sight of her corpse weighs heavily on his.

His madness creeps up on him more, now that he has seen the death of someone that you did not know well, but still knew. His tongue refuses to pronounce words altogether at times, and when he does remember how to talk it is often in Irish. You are patient with him in those times, knowing that it is a sickness, and you let him cling to your coat as you loudly remind him that you do not speak Irish. When his muscles swing in ways he cannot control, you try not to become too irate with the bruises he leaves. 

John still irritates the ever-loving shit out of you, and it helps you get back into the swing of things. Arguing with John, arguing with Sollux, playing dumb word games with Dave, and tending to your zucchini plants all help, actually. John pisses you off, but it is a solid, good burn. Sollux pisses you off, but you piss him off too, so it is a balance, almost a game. Dave- well, you don’t really want to talk about Dave. Or think about him too much or pay too close of attention to the fact that he still freckles even though the sun is gone and his hair is soft like the silk grown on Kanaya’s mutated corn or how he-

Your zucchini plants, you have missed. There are more of them now, so many more, but they are still just zucchini. Plentiful and discolored-green and full of gross seeds that you don’t eat because the fleshy part of them is satisfying enough in this frozen wasteland. And they’re zucchini, the seeds ensure that you’ll always have plenty more. 

Kanaya tells you that there are plenty of people to tend to the zucchini plants, and you smile at her the best you can before telling her no thanks. Anyone else you’d probably have ordered to go fuck themselves, but you have a certain fondness of Kanaya that prevents you from being overtly rude. It’d feel like swearing around your mother.

It takes you three months before you are willing to go on another excursion. Dave goes with you on this one. You don’t know why _(you do know why)_ but you like having him there. Gamzee teases you, saying you’ve found yourself a proper _”leannán,”_ and you know well enough that he means to tease you. You wish there was someone else who spoke Irish in your camp, since Gamzee refuses to tell you what anything he says means. 

You encounter two towns and one ancient, massive city on this excursion. In the towns, people have heard of you and your entourage. They both have promise for excellent trading, one capitalizing on mutated citrus orchards and the other a damn good source of clothing that can lock out the cold, provided you and your group get rid of certain pests for them. You fight three giant lizards with feathers interlaid between their scales in the first town, and a lone, terrible wolf in the textile factory of the second town.

The city does not welcome your group, but they are not opposed to your arrangement of giving and receiving visitors- after you take out a few armed soldiers. Really, who keeps letting assholes get their hands on guns?

Jake was injured in that fight, and Roxy had to carry him on her back during the second half. Kanaya nearly had the head of every single member of your group when you all brought him to her with the bullet still in the wound. John came over to investigate the noise, and even with him and Jake tag-teaming her with their charming smiles Kanaya was still having none of it.

You overhear Aradia asking Dave how the trip went, and listen as he excitedly tells her about how two of the three places you all went, you were welcomed with a form of adulation. He tells her that you’re like some king from ancient lore, uniting the world with a weapon in one hand and kindness hidden by strong words, and Aradia giggles and agrees. You have 14 secondary cities already, 15 Firevoiced in total.

That night, you take Gamzee’s hands in your own and meticulously kiss every inch of skin on them. You press light kisses into the pads of his callused fingers, solid kisses along his knuckles, and you press the whole lower half of your face into his steady palms. You kiss his hands and think back to how he was truly the one who started this all. It was him, it was these hands, you’re just the loud one.

These hands built the wagon. These hands built the first hut. You kiss the very tip of each finger, right where each dirty and broken fingernail ends. These hands built your soul up from where it laid in the ashes of a frozen world. These hands built this new society.

You are terrified, but that is normal. You are always terrified when you think of the future. But you have the hands of your lover cradled in your own, and you think that maybe, just maybe, you’ll all be okay.

Dave comes with you again on the next trip you take. Nepeta and Equius stay behind to train new hunters, and make sure that your meat supply does not run too low. No one, after all, is as good of a hunter as Nepeta. Eridan stays behind as well, and you can guess why. Feferi has needed to spend a few days alternating between the witches’ hut and the healer’s. You don’t blame Eridan for wanting to stay, and you wonder if you should feel bad for seeming like you’re running away from the problem. 

You leave anyway, and Dave and Gamzee are constantly at either of your sides. You head southeast, passing through a few of your secondary Firevoiced cities. A young girl asks you what it’s like in the primary Firevoiced town, and you tell her you suppose it’s no different from here, just a bit more people and Gamzee builds the huts. Her eyes widen and she all but entirely forgets about you, instead asking Gamzee to teach her everything.

You watch both of them fondly. 

You notice, when you turn away from them, that Dave was watching you fondly. You don’t address it.

You continue southwest, and find an old farmhouse with peeling paint and a well in the backyard. You restock your water supply before you go inside, and are surprised when a crazed man with a dinner knife charges at you from the abandoned living room at the end of the hall. You disarm him and are ready to put a bullet through his head, but he begs you to stop and screams that he has secrets.

Damara groans loudly when you ask him what secrets he has. You wave her off- she’s always too bloodthirsty for her own good. You adore her for that, but at times find it irksome. 

The crazed man tells you that there’s an old swamp even farther southwest from where you are, and that the person who lives there is allegedly very knowledgeable. Your curiosity is piqued, and your group knows that you’ll all be going there before you even say anything. Meenah laments the fact that this trip will probably have nothing worth scavenging, and Damara elbows her in the ribs and says something in her mangled tongue that you can’t make out. 

When you get there, your whole group is wary. Rotting reeds rise out of the swampy earth. A lone frog sits silently in the muck. Deep in the swamp, you can barely make out what you believe is a moss-covered cabin.

You go. Gamzee volunteers to go with you and a beat afterwards Dave pipes up as well. They are the only two who want to accompany you, while the rest are content to let you wade through the mud. An old wanderer sits inside the mossy hovel, seemingly in a trance. She stares at you all with unseeing eyes, but she nods, and beckons you closer. You realize what a terrible mistake taking directions from a madman was. But she is not insane, at least not in any way that was spurred on by the end of the world. She points to the center of your chest and asks you for your glittering pendant, and you hand it to her.

It’s a charm Aradia made for you. She said it would prevent past mistakes from ruining your future.

She nods slowly, observing it, and traces her gnarled fingers across its face. She then begins to speak. She tells you of the end of the world, which you already know about, and then tells you of a fleet she once led, out into space, leading toward a fresh world, an unsoiled one. You consider her words, and wonder if eventually, you too will fly into the unknown and pray for something better.

Her brother betrayed her during the flight. He’d meant to kill her by sending her back to this desolate planet to rot alone, but she survived. She had “friends” apparently. You ask her if she wants to return to the primary Firevoiced with all of you, and she shakes her head slowly.

She then promises, her fingers trailing lines on the charm, that you would see her again once more before you left this frozen wasteland. It sounded like as much of a prophecy coming from her as Rose’s promises did. You thank her for her time, and she thanks the three of you for your company, staring at Gamzee in a wistful sort of way.

You leave.

Aradia wants to know what happened to the charm she made you practically the moment you set foot back in the town, and you tell her of the woman in the swamp.

“Oh, you met Calliope!” she exclaims, and you shrug. Though, it’s Aradia, so she’s probably right.

Dave spends more and more time with you in your fire lit room, and Gamzee seems clingier at night. You finally pin Gamzee down beneath you one night when you don’t think he’ll slip fully into Irish, and talk with him about it. You promise him that he’s still your greatest companion, your _“Cara is fearr.”_ He pulls you tight against his chest and whispers into your hair, meaningless mumblings. You admit to him that you are in love with Dave before you even admit it to yourself, but promise him that Dave won’t change things any more than Tavros did.

He is reassured by the comparison to Tavros more than anything else. Dave is nothing like Tavros in many ways, but then, you are nothing like Gamzee in many more, so you doubt the comparison is faulty.

Dave takes you out of the village one day, wanting to show you a cave he had found. You’d found it ages ago yourself, long before Dave ever set foot in your city. You tell him as much, and he smiles his endearingly stupid smirk and tells you that he knows. He continues on, saying that he just figured it’d be a good place to start a fire and hunker down with you for a while.

You resist the urge to feel wooed. You get the deadwood from the opening of the cave- your blush makes you feel more than warm enough. The two of you do huddle together in front of that fire, the blaze between you and the opening of the cave. He is quiet for a time, and then tells you of his life before the world ended. He rambles, as he is wont to do, and you rant at him for a bit of your own experiences.

Then the conversation somehow shifts from his brother to toxic masculinity that he hasn’t worried about for two decades to pansexuality and you’re yelling at him about how stupid it all is, absolutely all of it. He kisses you- or maybe you kiss him, but you’re touching lips and holding hips and his breath is hot on your skin. The fire burns merrily in front of you, banishing the cold, and he is solid and warm to the side of you, banishing anything that isn’t the taste of him. You consider idly what it would be like if you could paint a picture of this moment, all red and brown and yellow with heat and solid earth and thick shadows falling across the parts of you the fire does not kiss.

He is beautiful above you, but you do not want to have sex with him. He understands. You rest together as the fire slowly dies, the deadwood burning to its embers. He whispers rhythmic, shitty poetry into your ear and you rub circles into the flesh above his hips and kiss his moving jaw. When the fire is almost entirely dead and the cold begins to creep into you once again, you ask Dave if you may see his eyes. He turns his back to the embers and seems nervous, and you are right about to eat your words when he silently slips his glasses off.

His eyes are red like the burns on your flesh and you cradle his face in both palms. Your lips brush against the eyelid on each of his eyes and he sighs pleasantly at your tenderness. It is a moment more intimate than you had thought possible, and you nearly tear up from how vulnerable he has made himself for you.

You do not. Because that would be dumb and overemotional and ruin a perfectly good moment. If he chuckles at you, it is for some other bullshit reason. 

The whole city is of a mind that the two of you had sex during your many-hour excursion but that is fine. Gamzee’s really the only one you want or need to tell about it anyway, you can let other people assume what they like.

He clings to you more, and you desperately hope you didn’t act like this when Tavros first arrived. Dave and Gamzee do not seem to get along too well, but you hope that that will die down when Gamzee realizes that Dave isn’t taking you from him and Dave quits being an unnecessary dick. The scout returns, and she spends the whole visit with Terezi. You don’t care, but right before she leaves again she drops by to tell you that the compasses are pointing to something.

You ask her what she means, and she tells you that there’s a range. She found many compasses in an old giftshop, and they all pointed north. She brought one with her, and she pulls it out for you to see. It points directly northeast, just like every other compass you’ve found since the world ended. She leans in close like her information is revolutionary and tells you that they’re all pointing to something, something with a powerful magnetic pull, and you hide your excitement long enough for her to bid Matria farewell and leave.

Roxy, Jade, and Eridan are the most enthusiastic about finding where the compasses point. There must be something about rifles and scientific intrigue. Nepeta likens your upcoming trip to finally pouncing on a particularly elusive prey, Equius wonders if you’ll be bringing this mystery item back, and if he should ask Horuss to come along with, and Meenah looks forward to this excursion as the biggest score she’ll scavenge. Everyone hears about the scout’s news, and there is a general air of excitement.

Right before you leave, your whole town is hit with a terrible plague. Kanaya is up past her neck in people who require her help, and very few people are spared the agony of boils and rashes and near-perpetual vomiting. Luckily, Kanaya is brilliant, and no one dies, although you all nearly die of fright when she gets a runny nose halfway through. Matria, thankfully, is entirely spared from the illness, so are you, Gamzee, and a handful of other people. Dave, Dirk, and Nepeta get it the worst, and you are very afraid you will lose your lover, your huntress, and your friend.

The witches find out what’s wrong while Kanaya tends to the ill, and has the able-bodied help her. You never knew you could handle watching and listening to so many people vomit, but you quickly adapt to kneeling down at their side, helping them roll so they don’t choke, and pulling their hair back. 

“A virus,” Rose tells you. You know very little about biology or medicine, but you figure she’s correct. Kurloz signs something when you’re not paying attention, and you ask him to repeat it. He signs again that he thinks the cause is in the bird meat. Matria is too young yet to eat solid meat, Gamzee doesn’t like the taste of poultry, and when you think about it, you can’t remember the last time you ate any fowl. You ask the rest of the able bodied when the last time they ate bird meat was, and they all cannot tell, or say it was a long time ago.

You return to Kurloz’ hut and he is vomiting again. You tell him he was right as you pull his wild black hair back from his face and he signs with shaking fingers that he knows.

You set the healthy members of your group that Kanaya is not actively using to destroying the bird meat in your stores. You’re so glad Nepeta and Tavros had the sense of mind to separate the types when you first started needing a store room for the smoked meat. It makes your chore so much easier.

But this presents a problem as well. Sure, you can’t eat the fowl, absolutely not, but your best huntress is so far out of commission you could cry with fear, and of the 16 of you still on your feet, none of you can pick up her slack. You all still need to eat, but you have a city of people and a tiny team of people who can bring in food- and Kanaya needs most of you helping her help the sick. On top of all of that, you just lost a significant part of your food stores.

You mull over it at night, in your fire lit room, and Gamzee reminds you of one very crucial thing. Tavros’ herd of rabbits is unnecessarily large. Sure, you kill a few of them every now and then, but for the most part the rabbit horde has grown with very little hindering it.

When you ask Tavros about it the next morning, he is sweating and Kanaya has tied his hands to ensure that he will not scratch at his boils, but he smiles and tells you that you can definitely kill many of the rabbits he’s bred. He asks Gamzee to carry him to their grounds, and he shows you which ones you need to leave alive for him. You are wary of the idea of killing so many rabbits, but promise to leave the eight he pointed to alive.

By the time the plague is all said and done, you did need to kill most of the rabbits. Your zucchini stocks are also laughably depleted. Two years ago, you’d thought you would never see the end of zucchini. Now, you are planting more as your friends- your city- your large, loud, raucous _family_ \- get back shakily to their feet after being hit by a nearly-lethal plague.

Your whole city celebrates your survival by lavishing attention on Kanaya and dancing to music made from rattling bones and ancient instruments. Dave’s recovery specifically, the two of you celebrate in private.

Gamzee does not like the fact that you spent the night in Dave’s hut, but you remind him that you’ve been gone for days on end back before Gamzee went with you on your travels. This is no different, and you loving Dave does not mean you love Gamzee any less.

“Like Tavros,” Gamzee says. It is a reminder to himself, and you take pity on him and spend the morning with him, twisting your fingers in his fiery hair and kissing his familiar skin. 

Two weeks after the plague is well and truly gone, you rally your people and go on the trip you’d planned. Horuss does come with you, and you hope for his sake that you encounter no or few battles. Horuss may have the mutation of unnatural strength, but his soul is a gentle one and you do not want to expose him to violence any more than you want to attempt to restrain Damara in a fight. Actually, that’s a terrible analogy, there’s nothing in this world you want less than to attempt to restrain Damara in a fight. Upsetting Horuss is a completely viable possibility that would just be unfortunate, getting in Damara’s way would be suicide. Gamzee notices you thinking hard about something, and slides his fingers into your palm. You hold his hand and smile a little, and move forward. Whatever happens, happens. 

You travel through many secondary Firevoiced cities and the people there welcome you and Gamzee with their traditional “messiah” bullshit. You do not feel like a worker of miracles. The only time you ever feel that way is when Gamzee’s arms have pulled you close or when Dave’s lips are at your neck.

Then you are exploring the unknown again, making marks on the maps that are so worn they feel more like old cloth than paper.

And then you find it.

The curves of an old wanderer vessel rise up out of the dust and ash in a crater that no plant life grows in. With a little effort, it might fly again. You salvage it. Your thoughts drift back to the woman in the swamp while you do, and you wonder if this is, perhaps, what she was flying when her brother betrayed her. Horuss and Equius work together to shift the largest items into the wagons of your caravan and Meenah sifts out the junk that is too badly damaged to be used, making your load much lighter than it would have been, had she not been there. She has a wicked eye for value, and a wicked spite for anything that has none.

The core of the old ship is a massive compilation of a rare sort of metal that you’ve picked up here and there during your travels. You circle around it a few times and- sure enough- your compass points directly at the core the whole time. You’re worried about radiation, but Equius, Jade, Roxy, and Eridan all assure you that the metal is harmless. Horuss offers to explain the exact nature of the metal to you, but you decline. Vehemently. Gamzee laughs at your reluctance to hear Horuss go on and on about a hunk of metal that he finds interesting, but you don’t even feel bad. Let him go join the science squad and chatter with them about it.

Sollux is excited to start working on the ship when you get it back to your city. The science squad is more than happy to welcome him into their fold, and you don’t see much of any of them for three days. 

Gamzee is ready, this time, when you break down in his arms and express fear for the future once again. What does this ship mean for you? Your city? Your entire goddamn chain of secondary Firevoiced cities? Would you all even fit in that ship, along with enough resources to keep you all alive for the duration of the trip to Kepler 22B?

Do you _want_ to leave?

Sollux pulls you aside one day and tells you that if they’re going to entirely repair the ship, they’ll need more of that strange metal you’ve seen here and there. He tries to explain what it is, but the alloy is entirely alien to you. Kurloz materializes out of nowhere long enough to sign to both of you that he could construct the alloy, if he had enough sulfur, steel, iron, scales, teeth, and fur. You’d picked up a sulfur mine a while back, and had been using it to make bullets, but you suppose sulfur could go to the creation of batshit metal too. That’s fine. Sollux asks you how Kurloz can move so quietly once he leaves and you tell him that you don’t know with a shrug. You go on a few more trips, searching for this strange metal as your primary goal, and Nepeta and Meenah are your greatest companions for that goal. You wonder if there’s anything they can’t find.

When Equius tells you that they have enough to complete repairs, you stop with the excursions altogether. The scout tells you that you’ve found basically everything worth finding, and you see more and more of her in your primary city. Usually with Terezi or Matria.

Months, you’re home and tending to your zucchini and family for months before anything significant happens. Feferi, Eridan, and you grow close, and she tells you excitedly that she and Aradia have become A Thing. You’re curious, since you’d assumed that she was with Sollux, and Feferi giggles and tells you that that’s what everyone assumed. Eridan looks wildly uncomfortable with that line of conversation, and you wonder what’s going on there. Feferi brings you gifts from the bottom of hot springs every now and then, now that the two of you are closer. You find pretty trinkets and oysters at the door of your fire lit room relatively often, and you try to pay her back by giving her the prettiest items that come to you from the textile city that trades with you. She is terrifying, sure, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t look fantastic in pink.

One day, Aradia wakes you up by pounding on your door in the wee hours of the morning. Gamzee rolls off of you when you nudge him repeatedly with your foot and you are sitting up when she sashays in, grin on her face and sparkle in her eye.

“It’s time for you to go say hello to Calliope again!” she tells you with great enthusiasm. You stare at her emptily for a long stretch of time. Gamzee stretches and sits up while you try to process her words, and he drapes himself over your shoulders while you ponder who the fuck Calliope is.

Aradia reminds you that you met her in the swamp, and you feel a chill go down your spine, despite the door being closed. You tell her that Calliope told you you’d see her again before you left the planet. Or, frozen wasteland, she called it, but you have no intention of leaving. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

You don’t want to think about it.

Aradia smiles brightly at you and tells you that you are leaving, this week, to go see Calliope again, and you sigh. You know better than to argue with a witch. Your little city becomes riled up when you announce another excursion, but a lot of people back down when you tell them you’re going to the swamp again.

Eridan, Dave, and Gamzee are the only people who want to go with you, and you find it fitting. When you ask Aradia if she wants to join you, she declines. When you ask why she wouldn’t want to go see her old friend again, since you’re not likely to go back to that swamp ever again, Aradia giggles and Rose tells you that she’ll see her again soon.

You’re dubious, but you know better than to argue with a witch.

Jade decides to go with you last minute, but that’s fine. You enjoy her company greatly. She reminds you of the beasts that you encounter in your travels: wild and inexplicable, beautiful for their power and utterly untamed by anything in the world. You admire her, you realize, and perhaps, in a different life, in a different world, you may have loved her.

You do not.

You travel to Calliope’s swamp, a talisman from Aradia tucked in your pocket for her. The people you meet along the way are surprised that you all are travelling in only one wagon, and are even more surprised when you inform the masses that you’ve stopped with your excursions beyond the confines of the trade network you’ve already set up.

Calliope welcomes you to her home when you find it again, and takes a special interest in Jade. Your role is entirely limited to handing Calliope Aradia’s talisman, and Jade chats with her for the rest of it.

At some point, you and Gamzee fall asleep on each other, and Dave falls asleep on you, and Eridan falls asleep next to Jade, in a chair in the corner. You wake when Jade and Calliope are settling down for some sleep of their own, and you shift so the arm Dave is on is not quite so cut off from your blood flow before returning to your own slumber. 

Eridan makes you all breakfast from Calliope’s swamp spices and the food you all had brought along, and Jade and Calliope continue talking. This conversation you listen to, however, because it involves Jade persuading Calliope to come live in your city with all of you. Calliope eventually relents, stroking her fingers over the first charm that she took from you, and you are not surprised. Rose has yet to be wrong about the future.

Aradia is very excited when your group arrives back home, and you leave them to decide where Calliope will live and work. Apparently, she’s a bit of a witch herself, and will probably join Aradia, Rose, and Kurloz. Or she thinks she may join the gardening team.

You shut yourself in your fire lit room with Gamzee, and you caress him until you no longer care about anything outside your door. He is filthy once again, but so are you, and your kisses taste of earth and salt.

He wakes you up with unpleasant thoughts, though. Thoughts about leaving. Of using the space ship the others have fixed. You don’t want to think about it. You don’t want to talk about it but he pries the words from your lips.

That you’re scared.

You’re scared of the future and you’re scared of moving forward and you’re scared of stepping outside this comfortable bubble that you’ve built for yourself. You’re scared of everything changing. You’re scared that you don’t even know if this other planet is inhabitable, or if you can get there before you run out of resources. You’re scared that you won’t be able to fit everyone on that spaceship, if you do leave.

You’re scared of what is to come, and Gamzee knows that. He brushes his fingers against your face and pushes the hair away from your eyes. He shushes you and touches you and lets you work yourself all the way up before he gently calms you back down.

He kisses your hands, when you have cried yourself out. He kisses your palms and tells you how warm you are. He kisses right above the wrists and tells you that you’re stubborn. He kisses each finger, whispering how smart you are, how capable, how wise. And then he kisses your lips, and calls you firevoiced. And you smile and a few last remaining tears slip down your face, because that title only ever means anything significant when he is the one to call you that.

You exit your home to go collect firewood and Dave pinches your ass when you pass him. Playfully, you smack his shoulder, and he laughs at you. It is one of the most glorious sounds you have ever heard. You play with Matria inside Kanaya’s home and shoot the shit with Damara over lunch.

That evening, while you work with your zucchinis, you think over your home here. You think of your companions and your huts, your lodge and smokehouse and collection of wagons. You think of Tavros and his rabbits, the witches and their charms, Nepeta and her hunting, Sollux and Feferi and Eridan and Jade and John and everyone else. You think of every goddamned person in your city and you think of how you’ve all come to contribute to something wonderful. You look at the arch of the old spaceship, now looming tall as a skyscraper, and you think that maybe, someday, you will use it.

But for now, you tend to your zucchinis.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello again! This is my second fic on Archive and let me tell you that was a lot of tagging I had to do. Please tell me what you think of it! And if you spot any mistakes, I'd love it if you pointed them out to me!


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